So much is always said about how beautiful the weather was on September 11, 2001. It was an absolute jewel of a day, sparkling and gorgeous. I remember walking to the subway absolutely astonished by the crystalline loveliness of it.
There was a reason for that, though most people who were in New York City then probably have forgotten about it. The night before, September 10th, there was a monumental deluge.
It was horrendous, too. It was the kind of driving rain that was falling practically sideways. Using an umbrella didn’t help. Nothing helped. I was waiting for maybe 20 minutes to half an hour for the express bus from Manhattan to Brooklyn, wearing a denim jacket over my blouse and slacks, and that didn’t help one bit either. I was totally saturated straight down to my underwear by the time I got on the bus.
Normally I made a habit of sitting on the right side of the bus every night since my stop was one of the first and there was always plenty of room. My reason for this was simple: I wanted to see the lights of the World Trade Center when we rode past it. Every night, that’s what I did, I looked up from whatever book I was reading when the bus reached lower Manhattan to check out those wonderful lights.
But that night was perhaps the very first time I didn’t bother to sit in a seat on the right-hand side of the bus aisle. That night I was soaked to the bone and sat, or rather dropped, in the first seat available – on the left. Well, I’ll just look at the lights when we pass the World Trade Center anyway, I thought. Meanwhile, air conditioning was blasting on the bus. It was freezing. Taking off my saturated denim jacket wasn’t going to help. It would only remove an extra layer. I kept it on and was in a rare state of weather-related misery. There are only one or two nights every year in New York when the weather is beyond unbearable and that was one of those nights. I tried to read my book but I was soaking wet and freezing cold and utterly uncomfortable…
And I missed the Trade Center.
I couldn’t believe it even as it happened because I always, always looked up to see it.
That night, though, I didn’t…
Well, I’ll be sure to sit on the right side and see it tomorrow, I thought to myself.
Except tomorrow was September 11, 2001…
The sun never shined so brightly as it did that morning because the city had been given a thorough cleansing the night before with all that torrential rain.
The beautiful morning didn’t stay beautiful for long.
Splendiferous Everything 